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10+ hours one one set of batteries? I've had a LED mag lite for years now, and it's got the original batteries still in it. It gets used probably about 1-2 hours a day, as by the time I get home it's dark and I need to take care of our horses. I absolutely love the thing, I wouldn't even consider using one with a normal bulb again.

Respectable stores like Steam will warn you about the types of DRM used by the game in clear terms

Steam only warns about the additional/external DRM, not about itself. There is no "Warning: to play this game you need to be logged in on Steam and have the game fully updated"

A very large reason for this is the fact that it's rather obvious that you need to have Steam running and be logged in to play.

Only obvious if you've used steam before, as someone who pre-ordered half-life 2 and couldn't play it for nearly a week after receiving the disk (had to pull my desktop over to a friend's house to activate it, as my internet was too slow)..no, it was not obvious that i needed to be online and signed in to play the single player.

For people saying "but there's an offline mode!" , you can't set that while your internet is down, you have to set that while the network is up and you're still connected to steam, and your games on initial activation force the patches immediately, which is fun when you have a 5GB a month download cap.

I fixed that though, since i already owned a copy and couldn't return it, at least i grabbed the pirated copy that doesn't need steam at all to play (the crack was out well before steam even became stable), but I never have, and never will buy or pirate a game from steam, or from valve at all, again. I still have my original install disks for half life, op4, blue-shift, tfc, counter-strike, etc.. so at least i can still play those to some extent. (local multiplayer at least for TFC/CS)

my kingdom for a mod point...though now I have this (somewhat disturbing) vision of the LOTR cast endlessly grinding through level after level of ghosts, barbarians, and other creatures, looting insane amounts of treasure, and eating every 30 seconds

^ This
Strip any copied text/dialogs, etc, and re-make it as a clone in the spirit of the origional, you can release the full game without the worries of using their copyright at all. (unless it's an RPG or text adventure,then you're in for a lot of work:/ )

Pretty much everything you listed DID exist in UO with the later expansions (soulbind, WoW-like quest system, instancing (bosses only though, not the entire level). Not sure what the UI complaint is though, UO's UI was fully customizable, you could drag anything anywhere onto the screen, spend a few minutes and you could make the UI look exactly like WoW if you wanted to. Personally I didn't like the additions though, they really took away from the open world feel of the game. (you have to remember, soulbinding wasn't NECESSARY, as gear meant almost nothing at first, you lose yours just buy another set from a vendor on the cheap)

Role-playing is the big one, I've yet to see that...at all in any current game. I miss setting up the conference table and chairs in the middle of our guild castle and having a (in character) meeting about the state of our alliance. I know about the UO freeservers too, they'd be great if they weren't so vacant of life, laggy, plagued by cheating, and the AI being ridiculously dumb even in comparison to the original. Not to mention there doesn't seem to be any role-players on them anyways.

^ This ^ God i wish i had modpoints when i actually wanted to use them.. Every time i hear about the complaints about ganking and the like, that's UO past the release of WOW when they decided to make "WOW 2.0" really, and it sucked in every way. Looting armor was useless before, at best you did it to make sure they guy had to go back to town before coming back. And who traveled alone in UO anyways? It was all about the player run cities, and aside from small tasks you'd always have at least one person watching your back.